A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

Post by abecedarius » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #39

Is there any hardware designed to just run cellular automata? I wonder if it could actually be a very efficient form of calculation, because cells are almost bits, but seem to possess more power than bits. For instance this Lisp in GoL. Could it run faster than lisps on "bit processors" if it ran on special purpose hardware? So instead of 64-bit processors we might have "64-cell processors" ?

Post by ngcc_hk » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

AprilArcus wrote: post #48

davesque wrote: post #37

One interesting thing about this is that it serves as a kind of simplified demonstration of the kind of computation that must be occurring or could occur with actual cellular biology. DNA really seems somewhat like a tape in a Turing machine (although technically a read-only one). But the entire system does compute a result which is an organism.

You might be interested to learn that DNA is not actually read-only. Besides viruses like HIV and transposable elements which permanently splice themselves in to the host's DNA, antibodies gain specificity through irreversible self-editing of the lymphocyte's genome via a similar (and perhaps, evolutionarily related) mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination

Post by drdeca » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 8:07 AM UTC

OscarCunningham wrote: post #71

drdeca wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be cool to have a structure with a line where, no matter where vertically (within a large range of vertical positions) a single glider crossed the line to the right , and no matter which of the 4(?) phases the glider has, signals would be sent somewhere indicating generally where the glider crossed, and the structure eventually returning to how it was (other than the signals it sent out) . Is such a…

It's beginning to look like such patterns do exist. See this comment and the preceding thread: https://www.conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=137171&sid...

Post by aasasd » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 10:58 AM UTC

drdeca wrote: post #56

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cells activating in random positions seems like a high bar. How robust are you to a rock suddenly appearing inside your body? (e.g. inside your heart?) A lower bar might be being robust to individual spaceships/gliders coming in from outside. But even there a collection of gliders is probably going to break through.

I think it would be cool to have a structure with a line where, no matter where vertically (within a large range of vertical positions) a single glider crossed the line to the right , and no matter which of the 4(?) phases the glider has, signals would be sent somewhere indicating generally where the glider crossed, and the structure eventually returning to how it was (other than the signals it sent out) . Is such a…

Post by nisa » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #61

nisa wrote: post #11

Not so exciting but still pretty cool: Conways Game of Life in a few lines of otus lisp* https://github.com/yuriy-chumak/ol/blob/master/samples/Conve... * otus lisp is a descendant of owl lisp ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utOVF0U7Zd8 ) with a nice ffi - http://yuriy-chumak.github.io/ol/

Wow, thanks for those links. I am well acquainted with Lisp, but I never stumbled upon these. The video was great too. I have played with Wasp Lisp which is very cool and the Wasp VM. And checkout how it can spawn drone nodes on different machines[1,2]. I think C and Lisp together are amazing. I have been using them for decades, but J and APL entered my life over 8 years ago, and I am hooked! Checkout a rework of the…